EE and MODx.  I have seen many debates over which of the two is the better.  Both of these systems are extremely flexible when compared to WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla.  Instead of having to work around them, they pretty much work around you.  Allowing you into insert their tags into your W3C compliant website.  For the last 8 months or so I have been doing the bulk of my development using EE Core.  About a month or 2 ago I heard about MODx.  I was in the middle of the sageinfinite.com project using EE so I really didn’t look into it at the time.  Now that the project is done and I’m looking to start a new one I thought it might be a good time to check out MODx and see what the deal is.  I used daddy-daycare.com as the website to test on MODx because its a pretty simple, straight forward site.  The SageInfinite site has much more functionality so I wouldn’t be able to quickly convert it over to another CMS.  Here is what I found in my dealing with MODx and how it compares with EE.

Interface

Hands down, without a doubt, MODx has a much better administrative interface that EE.  It’s all AJAX based.  It moves easily from option to option without having to reload each page as you click an option down the tree.  All administrative options for the installation are located in one place.  With EE, once you get to the administrative portion you have several options and then several more options after that.  This also has something to do with the way EE handles user input for dynamic content but we will get into that later.  Basically, you spend less time clicking around and waiting for pages to load with MODx.  EE 2.0 is supposed to have a AJAX interface, but that’s not here now and they have not announced when it will be released.

MODx wins this one.

Templates (Website Design & Structure)

At all times you can see the structure of the site in MODx.  In EE you have to go to templates first, then select your template, then select which file under the template you want.  In EE each of your main pages pretty much have the same information repeated over and over again with differences made in the content of the page.  Several items remain the same like header, footer, navigation.  So you have either several DB entries (or files depending on how you set up EE) that are almost identical to each other.  That’s a bit redundant to me.

With MODx you create one template with a tag to add content from the specified page you setup.  Then you associate the pages with the template.  You can create more than one if you want.  If there is a substantial change you need to make I would think that would justify changing the template.  If you have multiple templates you don’t have to copy the same data over and over if you don’t want, you can use “chunks”.  Chunks are embeddable HTML snippets.  Come in handy when you have to repeat the same code over different templates.  Yes, you can do embeddable templates in EE, however, there is still less clutter with MODx because there are less templates in general.

Another win for MODx

End User Interaction (Normal Folk)

I’m going to have to give it to EE on this one.  While MODx is great for developers and designers in terms of interface, I think it would be more confusing for regular people.  You may know them as your end user.  Not the people browsing the website, but the person your making the website for….unless its for yourself of course.  You can setup a person in MODx to add pages to a specific container, then on the page use Ditto to turn it into a blog or other dynamic content.  The weblog system in EE seems to be more friendly for the user than adding pages to a container.  When adding pages to a container the end user gets way more options than some of them should.  Examples being what type of document to create, cache clearing, whether to make content inline or an attachment, rich text options, logging options, etc.

With EE you setup the weblog with all those options preset for the user, so that the only thing they have to do is input the specified information.  MODx comes with TinyMCE installed so inputting text is a bit easier because you don’t have to use HTML to get HTML results.  EE doesn’t come with this feature installed by default, but there is a free TinyMCE plugin available.

The less the user has to do, the less chance there is of them messing up a site that is live.  It also makes it much easier to explain how to use.

EE wins this one.

Speed

Not much to say about this.  MODx is a bit faster than EE.  I would say by a good 2-4 seconds on this site.  Not that much faster but none the less faster.

Documentation

EE takes this one.  EE is very well documented and if you can’t find answers in the documentation you have the wiki.  If you can’t find the answer in the wiki you have the forums.  MODx….not so much.  MODx has documentation, wiki, and forums.  However, its not as easy to find the information that you are looking for.  You have to be pretty specific in your searches in order to get decent results….if you get results at all.

Conclusion

Three of the five items I covered went to MODx.  So I guess you can say MODx is the better CMS.  I would also like to say that I made those decisions based on marginal differences between the different features.  Its not like MODx blows EE away (except in the current interface).  Its just that I would choose those features over EE’s for my own personal development.  Ultimately I would say the decision to use either CMS would be based on the end user.  You can build whatever site you want, but if your end user can’t use the backend that’s not going to be too good for you.  EE maybe more of a hassle to move and build around, but its not that big of a hassle to discredit using it.  You will likely build faster with MODx, but not that much faster that it would be negative to use EE.

That being said, sites that I create for other people will be using EE while my own personal sites (including JarretRedding.com) will likely be built using MODx.  At least for now, until we see what EE 2.0 can really do.